These: Urspruenge des Internet

[Tobi]

Hallo liebe Forumsinsassen,

mich wuerde sehr interessieren, was ihr von der folgenden These haltet...ist ja Freitag...;o)

Bin gespannt auf Eure Kommentare, Danke & Gruss
Tobi

<zitat>
The most important prerequisite that made invention and development of Internet technology possible as early as the late 1960s was the scientific environment within the US stamped by the first phase (1947-1969) of the Cold War.

This first phase of the Cold War during the 1960s featured:

• The sputnik shock aroused by the first Russian satellite sent into the orbit in 1957. This caused the science gap, the fear of the US being technologically behind the Russians.
  -Events leading to an escalating tension between the USA and the Soviet Union. These included the shooting down of an US U2 plane in 1960, the construction of the Berlin wall in 1961 and the Cuban missile Crisis in 1962 that took the world close to a nuclear war.

The US military was devoted to technology, anxious to close the science gap and expected computer technology to be a key factor for following wars. Hence, the government founded diverse defense related think tanks like the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) to improve academic research. They also provided massive government funding for scientific research in the young academic field of computer science.
This environment allowed the Information Processing Techniques Office of ARPA to conduct a risky project in a new cutting edge technology area.

In contrast to the prerequisite, the development of the Internet was determined by a variety of personal, social, economic, political and cultural contexts. The origins of the Internet cannot be divorced from any one of these elements:
-Idiosyncratic and personal visions of Joseph C. R. Licklider, Robert Taylor and Leonard Kleinrock inspired by the desire to do good or the pure impulse to do scientific research.
-The social momentum of the young academic field of computer science and its demand for a more efficient use of rare computer resources, the connection between incompatible computer systems and access to unique resources and applications represented by Larry Roberts, Robert Kahn, Vinton Cerf or Jon Postel.
-The military need for a command, control and communication system that could even survive a nuclear war expressed in Paul Barans concept of a distributed network.
-Finally, the arising counter cultural radicalism affecting nearly the entire academic research staff in some way that sought to redirect technology toward more decentralized and non-hierarchical vision of society.

The struggle between two different paradigms characterized the Internet in its genesis. I will label these different paradigms the closed world and open world after the model of Robert Edwards. The closed world stands for the military, hierarchical and conservative Cold War society and the financiers of the Internet. The open world embodies the civilian, anti-hierarchical, free counter-cultural movement represented especially by its users and inventors from academia.

In the 1970s and 1980s, the struggle continued to affect the further process of development of the Internet. In fact, the collapse of the Eastern Bloc and the break-up of the Soviet Union in the 1990s ended the Cold War and therefore the ideological military level of the closed world expired. Nevertheless, the global market economy took over its position in the closed world. Since then, proprietary commercial interests struggle with the idea of a free of charge public information and communication system for the benefit of all people.

The Internet since 1990 may be the perfect synthesis of closed and open world. The paradigms of both worlds will always be a part of the Internet technology, inherent in its structure, design, use and image.
</zitat>

[Tobi]

Keine Meinung dazu? Oder ist es zu kompliziert in Englisch? ;o) Schade, wollte mal eine "Freitag-nachmittag-Diskussion" anregen...
Tobi